


Love is the Punchline Prequel

by mixedwithintellect



Series: Love is the Punchline [2]
Category: Don't Let Me Go - Harry Styles (Song), Kiwi - Harry Styles (Song), Medicine - Harry Styles (Song), One Direction (Band), Sweet Creature - Harry Styles (Song)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 12:18:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16326104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mixedwithintellect/pseuds/mixedwithintellect
Summary: the one where Harry is the universe and you are in love





	Love is the Punchline Prequel

You two had been drunk.

His hair was softened by the moonlight, tousled locks cascading across his forehead and curling against the tips of his ears. He looked disheveled and massively wasted. A Greek god who had stumbled into the sin of men, yet unable to fully shake his reverence.

You knew you were staring.

You couldn’t have been more obvious if you had a neon, flashing sign reading _I’_ _m Star-gazing_ _in_ _the Galaxies_ _of_ _Your Eyes_. But what do kids who are told not to stare in the sun do? They stare anyway. So you continued, a dopey smile induced by whatever drink Harry had made you in his fancy ass kitchen, with his fancy ass kitchen supplies.

You wanted to nestle in his open jacket, feel the roughed cotton rolling into balls along the edges of the material, have the uneven tie-strings lay, lopsided, in between your heads. You wanted to place your head against the slope of his shoulder, into the darkened scruff of his neck, and inhale. Not for anything explicitly sexual, just because your soul craved to know what it was like to be his. Laying together in the silence that only belonged to you two, in the midst of a universe of noise.

You wanted to brush your fingers through his hair and get an idea of what it would look like in the morning. The thoughts that made your cheeks flush a bit, perhaps unnoticeable with how red they were feeling already.

Harry wasn’t oblivious however – in fact, the liquid racing through his veins made him unabashedly brave in staring back. Your makeup was a bit screwed up, the eyeliner missing in patches from when you were crying from laughter as he made stupid, stupid puns. He loved how you smiled when he was being an idiot, being himself.

He poked each of your cheeks (after missing once and pushing your nose inwards by mistake) and giggled to himself. To him, you were the epitome of feeling alive.

“My head is too heavy,” you mumbled, feeling the command from your body to relax your arms and let gravity do its work. You slouched further in the grass, resting your head on one of the pathway stones. You were in Harry’s private backyard garden, a bottle of rum tucked between Harry’s legs and a gathering of gnomes watching from the tomato patch.

Harry was slouched against the side of his house, donning an unzipped jacket, sweats, and god-awful Nike sliders. It was one of the few outfits he made you promise, multiple times, to never mention to _anyone_ for fear it would leak to the public. Not that he genuinely thought you would, but after you saw his collection of ‘Normal Clothing’ you started continuously sending him pictures of clothing you considered “fuck-boy, Haz, it’s the shit girls don’t keep when the boys leave because they’ll find the same stuff anywhere.” He just wanted to make it clear, he would only be this expression of himself around you.

Right now, he wasn’t Mega Pop Icon Harry Styles, he was a drunk friend making O shapes with his mouth like a guppy and giggling quietly to himself, over God-knows-what. His butterfly tattoo movedwith each laugh, his skin patched slightly with dirt from when he tried to roll down a ‘hill’ that was genuinely nonexistent, a product of his drunken imagination.

“C’mon, over here then, love,” he straightened up, offering an arm to you and a spot next to him against the house. In an attempt to persuade you, he moved the bottle to his side and shook his hand through his hair. As if you would be goaded into curling up next to his shirtless form simply because he was cleaned up a bit.

Didn’t this boy know you would do anything he asked you to, and that would only get worse after a night drinking?

You slowly lifted yourself off the ground and crawled over to Harry, groaning as your body protested. Pushing some dirt off his shoulder, you tucked yourself under his arm and placed yours gently on his stomach.

The night was quiet.

“That’s better,” he whispered, eyes scanning the top bits of your face visible to him, as he tucked a piece of your hair behind your ear.

You loved it too much, you knew that perfectly well. You grinned nonetheless and tried to hide it by moving your face closer to his bare chest. Which didn’t necessarily help, because now you were surrounded by his aura and felt intoxicated for another reason entirely.

Harry wrapped his arm tighter around you, pulling your gentle beauty closer to him in the process. Your hair smelled like vanilla and that one hair product you always used – the one in the green bottle? He didn’t know the name, but he made a mental note to buy you 500 jars of it when he had access to his computer. Feeling smug at how greatly he would be able to provide for you, even in a small way, he nestled deeper in the space his body was occupying, taking a deep breath of the cold night air.

The world was spinning slightly after the bit he drank (“’M not a lightweight” he had, embarrassingly, slurred before you opened his patio door outside, but you both knew that was the biggest lie) but everything became extraordinarily sharp as he felt the puffs of your exhales against his chest. Maybe it was the feeling of masculinity that caused the swell of pride in his chest, some instinctive sense that yes, he felt complete. His heart was _so full_ with contentment.

Harry had grown up with the idea that he would be able to clearly recognize when his soul had been etched with someone’s name, like the universe would send a lightning bolt and he would suddenly feel his home transfer from the physical into some emotional connection with another’s soul.

Yet he had known for a while - all that you were to him. It wasn’t anything worth words – the most basic, simple things of life didn’t need to be drawn out into massive explanations. He could wax poetic words like the best of them, but he hadn’t found the proper analogies for something as simple and pure as you. Whatever the universe was centered around, didn’t matter, because it had become you, for him.

Not in a massive, delusional way. More like the sunrise echoed only softly how your eyes would shine, a sky set on fire. The feeling right before a thunderstorm made him think of your movie nights together. Being wrapped up in “ _oodles of blankets, Haz, we need oodles_ ” and not minding when you lit all 12 of his candles, because _Tangled_ had so many lanterns and you wanted to mimic the lake scene.

“You’re going to need to tap into your enthusiasm tomorrow, Haz.”

Harry blinked, groggily searching through his fuzzy mind to try and figure out what the hell you were talking about. After a brief moment of expectant silence, you sighed and leaned out from your safe haven in his arms to look at him.

One eye was now completely rid of eyeliner, Harry felt certain it was on his chest somewhere, an addition to the rest of the ink already there.

“Your horoscope, H. Gotta get jazzed up for your life soon, change is coming.”

“Yeh read my horoscope?” It had never occurred to him, despite your amateur obsession with the topic, that you would read others’ daily advice. Could his heart grow any more for you?

“Course. Wanna make sure the universe is taking care of my boy,” you sounded casual, scrunching your face together in an attempt of seeming like an authority figure, but it just reminded Harry of bunnies twitching their noses.

He giggled.

“If I’m yours, I just want you taking care of me, love.”

He knew the words were coming out, it wasn’t a mistake. It could be taken completely platonically, but the hushed tone of his voice – the shred of hesitancy that clouded over the flow of conversation – transferred his stance. A moment before, he had been a source of comfort and ease, and then he suddenly became an emblem of fragility, fingers itching to reach out and touch the skin of a person they could never know every inch of, before.

The moment felt inevitable, exciting and the most natural thing in the world. Harry saw a questioning glance shade over your eyes, before registering into something he couldn’t quite place.

To put it honestly, you wanted to kiss him. In the wild, dirty sense of the word – it really wasn’t much of a rapid mental shift after Harry spoke, because the idea had been lurking just beyond the horizon of your mind all night.

To grind your hips into his and see if the bones connected as well as your souls. You wanted to kiss him because you wanted to see how he’d react if you pulled on his hair, your lips moving harshly against the stubble on his chin. See if his ears were sensitive, if marks on his neck were the key to making him moan, make his hands move faster than his brain.

You wanted to see his weaknesses and for him to see your strengths. You wanted to prove yourself to him in a way you had never before, _could_ have never before. It echoed in your ribcage as an incessant longing, an itch you couldn’t scratch until you saw his eyes flutter closed, to see the millions of galaxies blindingly exploding on the backs of his eyelids.

But…

In the back of your mind, you knew he wouldn’t be able to remain for the commitment afterwards. To kiss him would be connected to the risk of never being able to kiss him in the same way again. Time changed people, an entire tour wouldn’t leave enough for you two to reconnect as the same individuals.

To know what could be, and to know it was possible both a beginning and an ending, caused your fingers to still from their pattern tracing his butterfly’s antennas. You were back, tucked into his side, feeling the heat radiate from his skin. Nothing had altered much in your outward countenance, or the way you kept your eyes focused on his potted daisies across the yard.

“(Y/N)...” It was strained, his eyes attached to a point on the roof so as not to be compelled to move before he knew what was on your mind. He had heard a low moan come out of your mouth as you were mentally imagining everything you could do to his body in the span of eternity, and it only made his own imagination run wild.

“C’mon, love, take what’s yours.”

So you did. Shifting yourself upwards, a bit slowly to ignore the dizzy sensation, you slotted one of your legs in between his. You two slowly took the other in, looking in the others’ eyes. His had never looked clearer, his tongue moving slowly around his lips as his eyes noticeably grew darker. He looked like a starved man, his head angled, tilting at a side to properly look at your beautiful face. He distinctly registered how red your cheeks were, how absolutely gorgeous you were at that moment.

You looked good all the time, in his truthful opinion, but it was an extraordinarily strange and surreal experience for him to realize that your beauty was so impressive to him at that moment, because it was all because of him. You were glowing because he made you feel like no one else. Harry only knew this because, for him, it was the same. You two were the same, identical cores pulsating under your breasts and echoing in your thoughts.

Like a trigger, you both set off. Tongue everywhere you could mark him, his hands grasping for anything they could manage in the suffocating exhilaration, the intoxication upping to unknown territories once he grew familiar with the taste of you. You swallowed your laughter at his excitement, how his breath became heavy and he shuddered with each bite against his collarbones.

His moans resonated in the air, sinking around the two of you and slowing down the constraints of time. The nature around you was in awe of his respiration, your gentle moans. It was something epic, beautiful, orgasmic in the natural rhythm of intimacy. Like a piano creating a melody out of thin air, he was an orchestra of harmony against your chest, his lips rushing crescendos against opening of your blouse.

“Jesus, woman,” he muttered, exasperated, as your hips swayed against his. (The bones connected, your souls connected, you didn’t know life could feel this good). You knew right then, you could fill the emptiness within his soul, patch up the wounds left by others. You could decorate his hair with flowers and make him the golden god of the universe. Because right then, everything about Harry was hypnotic, the heaviness of his eyelids, his lips swollen from pushing, biting, enveloping yours.

“Haz, you’ve got to be the most exquisite man I’ve ever known,”

You pushed his jacket off his shoulders, wrapping your fingers around his shoulders as you leaned in close to his ear. He was positively shaking, a quiet, inhuman noise escaping his throat as he slowly wrapped his hands around your waist to hold you steady. It only satisfied your theory that he was an entity beyond all humans, that the Sun would snatch him back in an instant.

“Y-yeah?” the strength of his grip wasn’t reflected in the staccato’ed pitch of his voice.

You nodded, humming a confirmation as your fingers drew close to the drawstrings of his pants, delicately brushing against the slew of tattoos littering his sides. The skin was delicate, pale under the moonlight.

Then, one of his hands reached forward to tuck between your two bodies, to wrap around your fingers. It was a gentle tug, enough for you to know he was regretful in doing so, but firm nonetheless.

“Y/N...I don’t, I don’t think that’s, it’s what we should do,” he started, seeing your gaze come up and his eyes shifted to either side of you, randomly staring at various points in his garden. You could feel his heart. It was racing.

“I have things I want to say. Before we do, I mean if we were to do-”

“Okay, Haz. We can talk, it’s fine.” you assured him, moving slightly away from his body so you wouldn’t be fully straddling the poor boy as he attempted to catch his breath. You had some straightening up to do, as well, fixing your bra straps he had somehow tangled up in his rushed motion to reach all pieces of your skin.

“Thank you.”

 

You were sitting on a barstool in his kitchen, an untouched glass of water on the counter. Harry had poured you one, saying you should start getting hydrated before exhaustion finally kicked in. You were fairly certain it was all his nerves, though, that he wasn’t sure what to do after what happened in the garden. He had simply reverted to the safe place of playing Host. You slouched further in your chair.

He was leaning against the counter, facing you, running his hands down his face. His jacket was securely on again, this time zipped. You were sure Harry had realized the scattered beginnings of purple markings against his chest would just make the conversation more difficult to have.

You finally sipped some water, not taking your eyes off Haz’s face, wondering why it looked so squishy as he ran his hands back up again.

You weren’t nervous exactly, to hear what he had to say. It was going to be a confession, followed by an apology. Something like, “I think you’re a great girl” followed by “I want us to stay friends.” The letdown was already etched in your mind, your body ready to respond to the rejection and take it in stride. You were never expecting Harry to truly confine himself to just being yours, not when he was ineffably Everything the creators had blessed the universe with.

(You never claimed to be subtle or hold back exaggeration, not when Harry was the most true person in your realm of existence.)

“I really like yeh,” he began, staring deeply at the floor. His hands went from tugging at the roots at the nape of his neck, to being stuffed in his pockets.

“I like you too, Haz.” You set the glass down, folding your arms and leaning against the counter. Fighting against the sinking feeling, you couldn’t let him feel sorry for you.

“No, listen for a mo’. I...” he turned his head to the side, squinting his eyes shut as he tried to find the words. They were painfully clear to him, but his mouth wasn’t in collaboration with his mind, a blockade of fear and nerves pounding through his veins.

“It’s okay, Harry,” Your words were gentle. Your heart felt heavy in your chest. It tried to fight your mind, scream out the words it scrawled against the jail of your lungs for years, the poems and odes to things as stupid as how adorable Harry was when he washed his hands before setting the kitchen table. But, hearts couldn’t win in the game of Protecting Yourself. This wasn’t some movie, it was your real life and your life wouldn’t be the same without Harry. Nothing else mattered, keeping him close was what kept you feeling sane.

You could give up loving him, if it meant he would still be there. Couldn’t you?

Being something more with Harry would feel like a waiting game for you, it was the fear that kept you from being honest with him, with yourself. You rationalized that it was the concept of not being able to have someone, the obstacle of it being firmly rooted as a friendship and thus developing into a game that had kept Harry intrigued and wrapped in the threads of your lust for him.

You weren’t necessarily low on self-confidence, but how could you keep up with someone like him? His words moved the world, and yours couldn’t even leave your thoughts. Harry Styles was the epitome of feeling alive, to you.

There was no way you could measure up.

Thinking back over the whole idea, the quick thought of confessing how his laughter was the only thing lately drawing you out of the depressed haze of reality, your bravery shrank in the cold light of sobriety.

“It wouldn’t be a good idea,” you agreed to his nonexistent response, missing the hurt confusion that trickled down his face. His spine felt cold, doubt circulating the edges of his vision. Hadn’t you wanted it too, out in the garden?

It was your turn to keep your eyes down, to proceed on with the last words you ever wanted to tell him. Or maybe second to last words, since you were apparently too scared to confess anything honest.

“You’re about to travel, you’ve got work to do. I’ve got projects coming up. It’s our time to be there for each other. Can’t do that if we’ve mucked around throwing blurred lines on the perimeters of such a great, _great_ friendship.” The bitterness was lost in your exhaustion of saying the words, the corners of your eyes stinging and your lungs burning as you looked up.

Harry was silently staring at you, his expression unreadable. It was unnerving, making eye contact with him in this way, and you wondered, with brief anger, if he was upset you didn’t want to give him a quickie before he jetted off around the globe for months.

In reality, that didn’t seem like him, but you never claimed to be completely rational. Not when everything in life had become so difficult, so quickly.

“Yeah,” he croaked out, nodding. The words were vapid, empty, a hollow agreement.

A brief hesitation, a determination sweeping over his features. His eyes were intense, boring directly into yours and softening slightly.

“I love...”

The silence was deafening.

“Don’t, Haz.” The lump in your throat was a mountain created in seconds, a pathetic echo replaced your voice as someone you had never known before. A woman, scared of love, scared of anything remotely beyond the comfort of predictability.

A woman who had caused Harry to freeze, devastation lapsing his entire body. His shoulders slumped.

Harry looked away first, nodding again as if it was the only programmed response he had in his turned-off brain.

“I love being friends,” he finished, the words sounding warped, strangled. He had a brief coughing fit, and reached for your water, looking up to ask for permission. You nodded, pushing the glass towards him and watching as he slowly drank the rest of it. His eyes were shut tight as he drank, and the echo of heartbreak didn’t leave his posture when he put the glass in the sink.

He didn’t look you in the eye when he shuffled off his god-awful Nike sliders by the patio door.

Or when he slowly locked it, pressing the panel next to the door that set the alarm for the night.

Or when he started to walk back to his room.

All he did was pause in the hallway, between the kitchen and the space leading to his room, shifting his body slightly to indicate that yes, he was speaking to you.

“I need sleep. Jeff’ll kill me if I’m hungover on the flight tomorrow.”

Hollow pangs of desperation stung, tearing its talons against your flesh, into your throat, around your mind. Your eyes were stinging with the need to cry, but your heart yanked back the waterfall before it could begin pouring out.

You had done this on purpose, with clear intention, there was nothing wrong with wanting to stay friends. It was keeping you both safe, keeping your lives orderly and not any different from the past few years, which had been some of the most joyful and content of your life.

It was only the drinks that had made this hard, you told yourself. Everything would be fine in the morning, once you two could reasonably look this over and agree it was a drunken, confusing, mistake.

All you could manage was a mumbled, “Okay” before he continued, his back still faced to you.

“Text meh. When ‘m away. Don’t want this to make..to have made anything weird between us.”

He left.

You both knew how his earlier words were supposed to have ended, how you were supposed to repeat them back, because it was the truth.

Everything was wrong.

You were in his dark kitchen alone. Your arms wrapped around your body tightly, nails digging into your sides without any mercy. Your back was hunched over, protecting your lungs and heart from shattering. Your body knew the process as if it had been trained to deal with this. You had prepared for this, after all. You brought this on yourself.

Slowly, with the distinct impression the night had not actually happened and you would wake up wrapped in Harry’s arms as he justified his midnight cuddle sessions as “just an accident, nothing I wouldn’t do with Nick, love,” you made your way to his guest room. The door was foreign to you, never having been where you spent the night, for the entirety of your friendship with Harry.

In fact the bed was unmade, Harry having assumed that you would take his room with him because that’s just what you two did. And him not having given it proper thought after you shred his heart apart in the span of seconds, mercilessly and intentionally.

You curled into a ball on your side, the naked mattress feeling like a shell against your skin. Against the overall intense feeling of nausea that had become a tyrant in your system, an insufferable bubble of laughter pushed through.

You felt sure you made the right, moral decision to maintain your relationship with Harry - to keep it clear of assured destruction and the eventual heartbreak when he discovered the depths of your flaws. It was the smart thing to do, because you were a smart girl. You made rational decisions that protected your future, that was all you knew.

Somewhere in the house, you heard a loud bang. Something had smashed against a wall. There was a brief silence, before the crying began several rooms away.

You had never felt so alone.

Love was a fucking joke.

 

 


End file.
